Monday, December 14, 2015

Cult Classic

Since stepping into film and music a few years back I've come to gush about Columbia, MO and Ragtag and True/False Film Festival quite a bit on this blog. So it is with great honor to let you know that I now live in Columbia Missouri and work for True/False Film Festival. Yeah, that happened! I can't believe it either! Honestly, I've been here for about a month and there isn't a day that I wake up and am not stunned that I get to be a part of this indescribable event. This weekend sealed the deal as I went to the magic art/fabrication studio of the fest and also attended a party where I got a little introduction to Lone Wolf & Cub. This place is the closest to a cult I could ever be a part of and, like any good cult member, I am ready to commit myself fully to its ways.

Friday, December 4, 2015

Filmmaker Magazine Interview: Almost There

Wednesday, October 28, 2015

Fest Coverage for H2N: Wind-Up Fest Wrap Up

Monday, October 19, 2015

Fest Coverage for H2N: Wind-Up Preview

Thursday, October 8, 2015

Film Review for H2N: Finders Keepers

Tuesday, September 1, 2015

Bitch Flicks Theme Week: The Female Gaze

It astounds me that all of the feminist film theory I soaked up in college is still put to use on a near regular basis! I LOVE MY LIFE! Anyway, I contributed an article to Bitch Flicks as part of their monthly theme week, this week centered on the female gaze.


For those unfamiliar, Laura Mulvey wrote Visual Pleasure In Narrative Cinema in 1973. The essay focuses on Freudian constructs in film, specifically the ways in which narrative cinema creates a space that aligns the audience with the controlling, dominant male ego through the "male gaze." It is definitely worth a read but for those who are averse to phrases like "castration anxiety" let's just say that women have been a prop in narrative film for a long long time. Used to evoke desire, fear, or simply advance a plot, women have largely remained a passive, one dimensional presence on screen, reinforcing the edicts of an unbalanced dynamic.



Bitch Flicks wanted to know the state of things. After all these years has anything changed in cinema? Are women still pretty little pictures? Bearers of meaning instead of makers of meaning? My essay, The Male Gaze, LOL: How Comedies Are Changing the Way We Look takes a peek at the male gaze, pointing out that a new class of female comediennes are out to subvert, trick and blind those that expect women to be polite pawns placed in a man's world- both on and off screen.



The whole male gaze series from Bitch Flicks (an archive of which can be found here) creates a positive outlook in terms of establishing the female gaze in contemporary narrative cinema! Slowly but surely we are turning heads in whatever direction we want them to go. So check it out! ...and also start watching Broad City (images seen here)! I love this damn show and totally freaked the other day when I accidentally walked through them shooting in the Meat Packing District! The two season finales are perfect, wonderful, hilarious, truthful examples of the strides female representation has made- highly recommend! Okay, now, back to Alaska! (OMG I AM IN ALASKA!)

Thursday, August 27, 2015

The NEW! Whitney Museum of American Art

Finally made it over to the new Whitney Museum of American Art towering over the end of high line in the meat packing district of New York City. The silhouette of the new building references the old one but it now has an airiness and brightness that is a definite improvement from the near windowless concrete behemoth rising from the Upper Eastside of Manhattan that used to be home to this beautiful collection of art. The current exhibit, America is Hard to See, truly feels like an emergence from the shadows as it follows the rise of modern American Art and the movements that followed, through landscapes & prairies, through industrialization & settling into a groove of all sorts of abstraction & ideas. The exhibit is overwhelmingly comprehensive moving from 8th floor down and featuring galleries of shared schools of style and inspiration- I definitely didn't see it all in the hours I spent there! But what I did see made me walk away with complete excitement for the future of American art and a much, much better attitude towards its current state.

After butting up against the art world for a few years while working in a studio I was often annoyed by the lengthy explanations galleries offer to contextualize or explain the work on view: the work should speak for itself. But, through scope alone, this exhibit really laid bare this act of explanation in contemporary conceptual art: It is moving away from commodity, it is creating the need for interaction, it is provoking thought.

In this show one sees the ballooning of images from Nam June Paik to Jeff Koons, to Donald Judd  to Richard Serra the physicality of the work becomes substantial, heavy, moving off the page & canvas and eventually into another realm entirely. The shapes and images they are producing are impeding, present, they overtake the space. As the art world continues to assert itself as a commodity, the birth of graffiti, conceptual art, video and performance, were the perfect post-Warhol response to diffuse the increase in capitalistic tendencies. These works move away from the solid form to provoke a cultural dialogue.

The meaning of a piece of conceptual art might be tacit at first glance but the act of communicating this intended meaning - or even another, interpreted meaning- through written or spoken words brings the work to life. This fact makes conceptual art an expression of its audience more than that of the artist or work itself. Even though this genre of art is often categorized as "art about art" as it relates to issues of commodity and form, those audiences unaware of the art world conversations end up reflecting their own views onto the work. The worked is defined by the audience, a true mirror of the society the work was created in, a perfect predecessor to the amount of selfie sticks I witnessed blocking the art at the Whitney...


As a whole the exhibit left me wondering what will come next? Now that the mirror phase of conceptual art and art addressing the narcissistic, false individuality of the millennials are past us what will be the next shape American Art takes on? Personally I think it is going to go back to the top floor of this exhibit, an overall move to realism in order to physically ground events that seem to dissolve into quickly forgotten hashtags, a solid way to romanticize the decaying natural world. Art will always be a reflection of the time in which it was made and the people living in it. Art also tends to prod at the status quo and help push out antiquated ideas...young artists, please act fast! This election is terrifying! (Images top to bottom: Stuart Davis, Edward Hopper, Ed Ruscha, Keith Sonnier, Ryan Trecartin)

Friday, July 24, 2015

What I Did On My Summer Vacation

Yes, yes...posting has been light. It is Summer. I'm swamped with (slightly paying) work. I know these excuses are excuses....sigh...but, I want to share some of the things I have been working on off-blog so you can see that I'm not just sitting poolside sipping fruit based cocktails and dreaming of a lost America of love. In fact I haven't set foot in a single Vermont waterfall this Summer! Your regularly scheduled blogging will commence soon...after I swim in a waterfall!

1. About two years ago I read an amazing book called Wild Ones: A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring, Story About People Looking at Animals in America by Jon Mooallem. I loved it so much I wrote my first ever book review, blindly submitted it through Submittable (for those film people unfamiliar think WithoutABox for writers- btw, when did Withoutabox become an actual website and not some sort of 90s internet looking porthole? Improvement!) sent it to The Believer and they swore they wanted to publish it! And they finally did in the Summer 2015 issue! The Believer is one of my favorite publications and being in it is such an honor!  But more importantly: you should probably read the book I reviewed! It is beautiful and perfect and really altered my way of thinking about contemporary nonfiction literature both as a writer and a reader.



2. "The current critic system is set up in a way that favors the Hollywood system as it continues to cater to one broad and boring audience: white dudes." Refinery 29: Do Movie Critics Have a Female Director Bias, Too? The Women Film Critics Circle, which I am a proud member of, sometimes get asked to weigh in on important Women/Movie related issues. I ended up contributing to this article about women in film criticism. Is bias there as well? Do women film critics judge films differently than their male counterparts? Is the inherent gender-ing of language possible to overcome? These and many more of your wildest questions will be answered in this piece!

3. Soooo....the annual Women's Film Festival in Brattleboro VT takes place in late Winter/early Spring- known in these parts as "Mud Season"-  and features films made by women about women. The event is a fundraiser for The Women's Freedom Center, a nonprofit dedicated to ending violence that provides advocacy for those affected by it. I do some work for this organization and I've been giving input into the 2016 fest! Super excited to be working on this project, really hope I can help make it grow!

4. SCREENING! This Summer I got an e-mail asking me to join another screening committee and, when offered the chance to pursue my dream of film programming & writing, I felt the need to say "Hell Yeah!" Let me tell you, film screening in the Summer is an entirely different beast than film screening in the Winter! I think having helped produce a movie makes me take the time, even on a beautiful day nearly canceled by sunlight, to evaluate each individual labor of love from start to finish. (swaps sun soaked eyes for film soaked ones)

5. ...and, lastly, yes. I did vacation for a day or two. In Milwaukee! Yeah. You heard me. MILWAUKEE! I did my Blue Velvet/hipster duty of visiting the Frederick Pabst Mansion, went to the impressive art museum and, most importantly, accidentally stumbled into an East Indian Deco movie theater called The Oriental that reminded me that the spectacle of watching a movie will never die!

Okay, so that's what I did on my Summer Vacation! At least I have a full month more to get outside and maybe dip my toes in some water!

Tuesday, June 30, 2015

Film Fest Review for H2N: BAMCinemafest, The Russian Woodpecker

Monday, June 29, 2015

Film Fest Review for H2N: BAMCinemafest, Selected Shorts

Thursday, June 25, 2015

Film Fest Review for H2N: BAMCinemafest, Pervert Park

Saturday, June 13, 2015

Interview for Filmmaker Mag: Director David Shapiro, MISSING PEOPLE

"We are all being gentrified. Even our interiorized space, to a large extent, is being coopted through social media. Everything is self-conscious and recouped, our interests, our tastes, our look, our posts — our brand. While people are branding themselves, what’s authentic and what’s cultivated is becoming harder to discern."- artist & filmmaker David Shapiro on his new feature film Missing People interviewed for Filmmaker Magazine, full piece available here



Friday, May 29, 2015

Film Graffiti

Sorry, it has been awhile! My screening season has been extended to include even more festivals! YAY! I am so excited to continue to help films find audiences! But...it also means my free time is at a premium (looks at empty fridge, eats non-rotten parts of an apple...and some rotten parts). A few days ago I read about a project that made me so excited about film that I felt the need take a moment and share: Peephole Cinema.

The kinetoscope was one of the first ways moving images were brought to people. In the 1890s Edison & his colleagues, inspired by Eadweard Muybridge, began creating a way to show successive images to create the illusion of continuous movement. A viewer would peer into the eye-holes of a large box-like contraption outfitted with lights and motors and lenses and be able to see the first films ever created, the beginning of a keyhole voyeurism that soon turned into a communal experience.

The Peephole Cinema project harkens back to these early days of small scale watching, a "miniature cinema collective" with locations in Brooklyn (hosted by Uniondocs), L.A. (hosted by Automata) and San Fran (Out of the Box Projects). The curatorial direction of these films seems to favor the artistic but since each curator chooses the next the range of projects featured is limitless! Right now Sam Green's dreamy cable car film that captures the hazy familiar randomness of public transportation is on view in SF,  a beautiful piece whose meaning takes on even more when displayed in this medium and in this city.


The idea of someone randomly happening on a beautiful moment of moving image makes me so happy! Democratizing the artistic beauty of film! Sharing visions of the world! The potnetial for localized filmmaking/screening! Superb film graffiti! Whether you just happen by or you knowingly find these places it is a platform for cinema that I really hope can become a ubiquitous artform! Hmm...maybe this is what we should be using dead drops for? 



Tuesday, April 28, 2015

Tribeca Film Fest Review for H2N: Sworn Virgin

Sworn Virgin reviewed for Hammer to Nail.

"...the type of narrative that can only be told through film."